


Nothing to Sneeze At

by Paian, Sid, theeverdream



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Adventure, Alien Biology, Alien Flora & Fauna, Alien Planet, Aliens, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-17
Updated: 2011-04-17
Packaged: 2017-10-18 06:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sid/pseuds/Sid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/theeverdream/pseuds/theeverdream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one with the hugmonsters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing to Sneeze At

**Author's Note:**

> Co-written in the SG-1 fic trees community at Livejournal in 2009. The comm is now at Dreamwidth: [The Arboreal Gate](http://arboreal-gate.dreamwidth.org).

Jack sighed. He supposed he should be happy. His team was home unharmed, and there was no botched mission to worry about as it was a simple survey. Everything else took a far back seat in the grand scheme of things. Honestly.

But he never liked being embarrassed.

Over the years, the phrase "coming in hot" had applied to SG-1 numerous times. Usually they were being chased by Jaffa, or angry natives who apparently didn't understand the whole "peaceful explorers" thing Daniel was always trying to save their butts with, or a mothership had shown up and flying things with big shootey lazers were coming after them -- or something else that was large, menacing, and formidable with weapons and armor and teeth.

Not things that could potentially, by a man less macho than himself, be called "fluffy."

"What happened, Colonel?" General Hammond demanded, striding into the embarkation room and through the ranks of SFs as the closed iris was ... well, irising back open.

"Hostiles, sir," Jack replied, watching the bristling array of weapons droop at a gesture from Hammond. They put him in mind of porcupines' spines. Not fur. Emphatically not fur. "Big ... hostile ... hostiles."

"They were not hostile," Daniel said. He was trying to rake his tousled hair into submission and shrug his uniform back into a semblance of symmetry at the same time, which combined into a kind of spastic wriggling motion that didn't lend a lot of gravitas to his objection. "If you'd just given me a chance to -- "

"To get the life squished out of you?" Jack shot back.

"There was a significant degree of jeopardy," Teal'c said. He looked down at himself with some distaste, and brushed ineffectually at his tac vest. "And dander." His uniform was disarrayed too, but _he_ still had gravitas. Maybe because he had no hair to tousle.

Carter looked pained as Hammond's glare shifted to her in clear expectation of more sense than he was getting from the other three. "Sir," she said smartly, drawing herself up straight. She was the most tousled of all. Probably because she had the most hair.

"Captain," Hammond said, in a low, warning drawl.

"Sir," she said again, helplessly.

Enunciating with care, Hammond said, "What kind of hostiles, Captain Carter?"

Carter sighed -- it sounded _exactly_ like Jack's sigh, Jack thought, she had the sigh thing down pat, gonna be a great CO one day, if they weren't both cashiered for silliness unbecoming of yadda in the next sixty seconds -- and said, "Hugmonsters, sir."

Hammond blinked at Carter.

"Debrief in an hour." At this point, that was all that he could say.

As SG-1 left to take care of their showers and medical exams, Daniel sneezed.

As a group they pulled up short just past the door. Three of them looked at Daniel. Daniel looked back, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, holding it up to his nose with both hands. They all waited to see if he'd sneeze again.

He did. Vigorously. Several times in a row.

"I thought pet dander was the _one thing_ you aren't allergic to," Jack said -- or started to say. What came out was "I thought pet dander wa _choo_!"

"Even if he is having an allergic reaction to the hugmonsters," Carter said, reading Jack's mind, the way they did, "why aren't ha _choo_!"

By which she meant, why weren't his antihistamines handling it, and when Teal'c pointed out that the hugmonsters weren't pets by saying "The indigenous life-forms of P3X-228 are not domesticated Terran maaaaCHOOO!," the foundation-shaking boom of his sneeze announced that Junior wasn't handling it either, and they knew they had a problem.

Behind them came a chorus of sternutation from the SFs. Hammond, fighting courageously to speak through his own mighty sneezes, ordered them back in and called for a decontamination crew and preparations for quarantine.

SG-1 had just trudged back into the embarkation room when the klaxon blared and Harriman's voice announced "Unscheduled offworld activation" over the PA.

Hammond called, "Close the i _choo_!"

The iris irised closed. The SFs bristled, wobbling aim rippling through the group of them with the staggered sneezes. It made Jack think of wind-ruffled grass instead of fur. That wasn't an improvement.

The last chevron locked, and the wormhole engaged with a muffled whoosh behind the trinium-titanium shield. After that there was sneeze-punctuated silence until Harriman reported, "We're receiving a MALP transmission. Identification code ... It's the one we sent to P3X-228."

Which SG-1 had left behind in their rush to escape the bone-crushing hugs of the herd of hugmonsters.

"They dialed us back," Daniel said, with soft delight.

The decontamination crew arrived, along with Fraiser and two medics in hazmat suits.

"General, we have both audio and video from the MALP," Harriman said.

Nobody had ever thought to put a monitor down in the gateroom, and because of the potential quarantine situation nobody in the gateroom could go up to the control room, so the other technician got a monitor turned around and pushed close to the glass so that they could see it. Not that they could actually make it out from down here; Jack pulled out his monocular, raised to to one eye, and saw a fuzzy blue hugmonster head looming close to the camera, the substantial remainder of fuzzy blue hugmonster body hunkered down beyond it.

It looked like the big blue guy from _Monsters Inc._ , only without the horns and teeth and with about twice as much hair and four arms instead of two, and it was the only blue one -- the others' coats ranged from pure white through lime green and lemon yellow to grape-juice purple. Harriman piped the audio through, and the noises it was making -- same rumbly growls and soft trills and whistles as before -- sounded a lot like worry and urgency. It tapped lightly on the lens protector, blinked hopefully for a few seconds, and then rotated its head on a scary-flexible-we're-talking-Linda-Blair-here neck to look at the ones behind it, and whined.

"Tell it we're here, we're -- _choo!_ \-- listening," Daniel said.

At a gesture from Hammond, who was using the monocular Teal'c had handed him while Carter and Daniel looked through their own, Harriman switched channels and said something into the mic. Blue's head whipped back towards the camera, its mouth and eyes wide and round. It made an "Eeeee!" noise and bounced on its haunches, blinking like crazy, and a chorus of excited chitters came from the ones crowding in behind it.

"So what now?" Jack started to say, but he sneezed too hard to get the words out, and on the screen the fuzzy aliens were already starting to act out their answer to that question.

Blue stayed in a crouch but backed away, sweeping its two left arms out in an MCish gesture of _watch this_. The movement seemed to indicate comprehension that the MALP lens connected to a transmitting camera. It also sent a billowing swirl of eddies through the drifting dandelion stuff the air was full of, which set an itch going in the back of Jack's head. He remembered how that stuff had swirled around them during the mineral survey, but none of it had stuck. It was weird that none of it was sticking to the hugmonsters' fur.

"Sir," Carter said, "maybe it's not the -- _choo!_ \-- dander we're reacting to."

"That stuff was in the air the whole -- _choo_ \-- time you were bagging rocks," Jack said. "We didn't start -- _choo!_ \-- doing _this_ 'til after the -- " He sneezed too hard to go on, and made an exaggerated hugging gesture to finish.

"A delayed reaction we have perhaps bisattributed to the bore proxibate event," Teal'c said -- with a freaky resonant nasality produced by holding his nose to suppress the sneezes long enough to get the words out.

Daniel didn't weigh in, less because he was sneezing too hard than because he was mesmerized by the activity on the screen.

Beyond Blue, Lemon was clutching at its throat with its two upper hands and windmilling its two lower arms in a panic display, and Grape Juice's fake sneezes were shaking its whole furry body. White and Lime looked at the camera, as if checking to make sure somebody was watching, and when Blue gave them an urgent go-ahead wave, they ran over to Lemon and Grape Juice and wrapped them up in mighty bear hugs. Jack keenly remembered thinking _four-armed bear hug, how the hell do I break this without hurting the thing_ and then just releasing all the instinctive pushback tension in his body and slipping down and out of the circle of White's arms, then shouting for his team to do the same. The fuzzy aliens had kept on coming, kept trying to hug them. Lemon and Grape Juice were submitting to their hugs patiently -- making a show of it, looking over at the MALP as if to say _See? Like this. So simple. See?_

Blue came back from the edge of camera range, very slowly and obviously counting off time on its fingers. Sixteen fingers, about four seconds per finger, a little over a minute -- and White and Lime released their hold.

Lemon did a jiggy happy dance, and Grape Juice turned a couple of _See? All better!_ cartwheels, while Blue trilled and whistled urgently at the MALP.

"They weren't attacking us," Daniel said, and sneezed. "They were trying to immunize us."

" _Of Mice and Choo!_ ring any bells, Daniel?"

With a kind of disbelief, Daniel shot back, without sneezing at all, "Yes and that was horrible but he was _sorry_ and if someone had just helped him learn to adjust the amount of -- "

"And how's anybody gonna do that when we can't talk to them?"

"They're communicating pretty well with us right now."

A loud chirpy sound came through the feed from the planet and startled them all into looking up. All of the hugmonsters were gesturing emphatically with all of their arms: _Come on. Come on!_

"Clear invitation to come back and get -- _choo!_ \-- hugged better," Daniel said, and, as Jack thought _Or get the life squished out of us_ , quickly added, " _Not_ to get the life squished out of us."

"They appear to believe that the situation is urgent," Teal'c observed, and sneezed colossally.

"But they're making no move to shut down the _choo!_ ," Carter said.

"They may not know how," Teal'c said.

"Or they may not know they need to," Daniel said.

"So we stop transmissions, let it shut _choo!_ on its own, dial 'em _choo_ ," Jack said.

Mopping at his eyes and nose, Hammond turned to where Fraiser was scraping flakes of dander from Teal'c's shoulder into a sample container. "Doctor?"

"It's possible that deep pressure induces a neurohormonal response to counteract the allergens, or that their coats have antigenic or histamine-antagonistic properties, but I'm speculating wildly, sir. To develop a chemical counteragent, I'll need samples from the planet itself, especially given SG-1's suspicions about airborne material."

"Sergeant Harriman," Hammond called, "suspend MALP tra _choo_!"

"Suspending transmissions, yes, sir," Harriman said, and the monitor went dark.

Teal'c said, "I volun _CHOO_ ," by which he meant that he was tough to begin with and could take a hug better than any Terran, and that even if Junior couldn't override his allergic reaction he could still heal any orthopedic injuries that resulted from the deep squeeze. Then Teal'c's brows rose high and his eyes went wide and he dropped his head and pulled up his T-shirt to reveal the larval Goa'uld emerging from the pouch in a writhing, hissing state of distress. Its mouth opened wide, it coiled as if to strike, and then it shook in a snakey paroxysm and released an explosive spray of mucus.

"Wow," Carter said. "Who _choo!_ knew they could sneeze?"

Jack looked down at his slime-sprayed arm and then up at Daniel.

Daniel said, "Ew," and sneezed.

Junior drooped for a couple of seconds, then retracted slowly into the pouch. With admirable grace, Teal'c withdrew in silence beyond snake-spewing range.

So much for Teal'c as guinea pig -- Junior being directly affected was one too many variables. Wiping his arm down as best he could with a bandanna, Jack said " _Choo!_ " to Hammond, then tapped himself on the chest with his index finger to indicate _I'll go, sir_.

But the gate wasn't shutting down.

They woke the MALP up to see if one of the hugmonsters had stuck an arm or something into the event horizon -- Jack really, really, really hoped it wasn't an arm -- but except for White, who was hunkered down appealing directly to the camera, they were all standing well back, all still waving urgently, and no object protruded from the wormhole. They were making a lot more noise now, a barbershop-quintet harmony of sustained, keening cries. They really, really, really wanted SG-1 to come back through.

What they could see, when they looked closely at the gate, was a peppering of little impacts in the event horizon, like raindrops on a watery surface. With some effort, Carter asked Harriman to check some readings, and he reported a minuscule but measurable series of continuous impacts against the iris.

"It's -- _choo_ \-- that seedy stuff?" Jack said.

Carter said something about how they had to be more than seedpods if they were causing the gate to maintain an active connection -- drifting fluff didn't have the mass or velocity, even in aggregate at the concentration she'd observed, even if the wind were gusting -- but was sneezing too often to speculate about what kind of more.

"Wormhole has been active for eleven minutes," Harriman reported, reading all of their minds.

Twenty-seven minutes to go.

Carter and Daniel exchanged a long look.

"Worth a try," Daniel said, and sneezed into his sopping handkerchief.

Carter sneezed into hers, and said, "Yup."

They came together in the center of the embarkation room in what looked like a speeded-up version of a romantic slow-mo reunion embrace. First they tried hugging each other at the same time, and when that didn't seem to work, Carter suggested they trade off, one hugging as hard as possible and the other passively receiving. They made sure to hold for a good ninety seconds each time, which given the whole violent-sneezing thing looked both painfully uncomfortable and pretty darn gross, while Jack had visions of wild gateroom hugfests versus orderly military administration of hugs and tried not to think about what was going to pass for a hug with Junior and who was going to administer it. But it was no go; the sneezes, runny eyes, and itchy throats didn't ease up.

Hammond said, "Time, Sergeant?," and Harriman said, "Twenty-one minutes remaining, sir."

And one of the SFs went to his knees, laid his weapon down with care, made a can't-breathe gesture towards his throat with a hand visibly covered in hives, and keeled over.

"Sir," Fraiser said after she and the medic had worked on him for a few minutes, "this man may not survive transport to the infirmary even if we break quarantine. If there is something the aliens can do ... "

Hammond called "Open the iris!" just as another SF went down.

"How can we communicate an invitation to these life-forms?" Hammond asked Daniel, as one of the medics went to the second SF's aid and Fraiser directed one of the decontamination crew to help the medic and another to grab samples of the seedy stuff that was starting to drift out of the wormhole.

"I don't think we have to," Daniel said, looking through his monocular and pointing up to the monitor. White was crouched closest to the camera now, a surprisingly human look of pleading distress on its furry face, gesturing _Come on, come on, come on_. Blue, on the other hand, was just visible past White's upper left shoulder and just walking past the MALP towards the gate. Its friends were tugging at its arms and fur, chittering in upsetment, apparently trying to hold it back. "Walter," Daniel said, "adjust the _choo_ to follow the blue one!"

As the camera panned around, Blue came back into view, shaking off its worried friends, squaring all of its shoulders, and approaching the shimmering active wormhole.

Everyone conscious and ambulatory in the embarkation room turned towards the gate.

Two of Blue's arms came through first, and the rest of it followed, its lower arms hugging itself in what looked like fear. Its coat had the color and ripply shininess of the event horizon, as if the event horizon had grown a fuzzy bearish humanoidish body to interact with them. It took a few steps down the gate ramp, seedy stuff swirling around it, and stopped to look around with its 320-degree swivel head. It blinked wildly, its mouth open wide and round in what looked like terrified, delighted awe, and let out a soft, high trill.

Daniel stepped forward.

Blue held its two top arms open, whistled inquiringly and slowly began unwinding its two lower arms from their frightened grip around its middle.

"Thank you for coming," Daniel said. "We just didn't understand that you were trying to help us. We over-reCHOO'd."

"Eeeee." Blue padded toward Daniel, all four arms open to receive him.

"Daniel."

"I know, Jack." Daniel put out a hand to ward off Blue, turned his head to sneeze, wiped his nose on his arm and turned back to face the alien. "Please, this man needs your help." Daniel backed away, beckoning Blue to follow.

Blue trilled twice and headed straight for the SF Fraiser was frantically working on between sneezes that were amazingly powerful considering the tiny frame they came from.

"Ma'am," said the medic, looking worriedly at Fraiser through the faceplate of his hazmat suit. They'd lost both pulse and respiration and they were about to lose the airway completely, and the medic was doing CPR while Fraiser was preparing to bag.

"Maybe the doc should go first, if it's getting to her through the protective gear," Jack managed to choke out past his own sneezes, and his own reservations about said tiny frame being subjected to a deep squeeze from a seven-foot-tall life-form that might not know its own strength.

"Our gear is working fine, Colonel -- I'm sneezing because I've been fighting a headcold and the meds are wearing off. The problem is how we continue compressions while the alien ... administers its hug."

Blue had knelt down -- an extremely disconcerting sight when its legs were in view and you could see how they folded backwards on reversed knees. Its lower hands were clasped together in what Jack interpreted as an _I won't use these to hurt anybody_ message, and one upper hand was waving in a bid for attention. It swiveled its head around to make sure that everybody was watching -- especially Teal'c, Jack thought, as it paused for an extra second on the biggest human in the room and the zat gun he was pointing at it -- and then raised both upper hands to its furry face. It gave a gentle squeeze, released, gestured down at the supine SF, looked at Daniel, and waited.

"OK?" Daniel said -- to Hammond, Fraiser, Jack, whoever was going to make the decision, while he held eye contact with Blue.

"Doc _choo_ Fraiser?" Hammond said, and Fraiser said, "Yes, let it try," and Daniel nodded to Blue and said "Go ahead, thank you, please try" without a sneeze and in a voice that managed to be kind and encouraging and urgent all at once, and made a sweeping gesture from Blue to the SF.

Blue made a soft tweedling sound and cupped the SF's welted face in its huge, fuzzy, paw-like hands. A minute passed, and pulse and respiration came back. Seventy seconds and the hives began to clear, but the SF didn't come around, and Blue kept its paws where they were. Ninety seconds. Two minutes ...

... and the SF's eyes flew open and he gasped and thrashed and said "Whoa whoa whoa what the, whoa."

Fraiser and the medic restrained him and soothed him, and Blue drew its hands back and moved away in a crouch before rising to its full height in what looked for all the world like a considerate attempt not to scare any more crap out of the SF than it already had, and looked around, holding its hands out.

By which it meant, _Next?_

Next was the other downed SF, and when he'd recovered and the medical team was giving both SFs a full follow-up, Hammond directed Daniel to go, then the rest of SG-1 while a line formed behind them, Hammond at the rear of it. Jack wasn't crazy about being face-hugged himself, but he kept his coping wisecracks to himself -- he was getting kinda fond of Blue, who seemed pretty attuned to the meanings of human vocal inflections, and didn't want to hurt its feelings. And, OK, he had to admit it: in the event, it was almost sweet, staring into the big dark eyes while the big furry hands cupped his face. Now he knew how his dog had felt every time he did that. Wasn't so bad being on the other side of it.

At Teal'c's insistence, they saved the symbiote for last in case the goop from Teal'c's pouch did something to "attenuate the touch's efficacy." There was a brief hitch when Junior refused to come out, but Teal'c spoke to it in Goa'uld -- "You don't want to know," Daniel said when Jack glanced to him for a translation -- and then there was another brief hitch: Blue recoiled, let out a sound like a tribble facing a Klingon, and refused to touch it. Jack said, "Only for you, T," and wrapped his hand around the slimy thing. He resisted the strong temptation to squish the life out of it, and hoped his demonstration of how nothing bad would happen didn't result in something bad happening, like the snake suddenly hitting maturity and deciding Jack would make a very nice host. When nothing bad happened, Blue reluctantly did the laying-on-of-paws thing, emitting a nervous tweedle the whole time, its big round eyes and mouth pressed down into flat wincey slits. After exactly sixty seconds, the snake retracted abruptly into the pouch, and Teal'c let out an audible sigh of relief. "All is well now," he said to Blue, soothing its chittery startlement at the rude way the symbiote had pulled back. Then he took a clean handkerchief from his pocket, mimed wiping his palms down with it, and offered to do Blue's. Blue held its hands out, and gave a soft, pleased rumble as Teal'c cleaned them up.

Teal'c stepped back. Blue looked around. Everybody was OK, including the SFs who'd been most severely affected. Everybody was on their feet, nobody was sneezing, nobody was choking, no eyes or noses were running, everybody's skin was clear. Blue bounced on its flexible backwards knees a few times and let out a gleeful "Eeee!" and opened all four arms.

Daniel stepped up to it, said "Thank you for making us better," and, before Jack could say anything to stop him, gave it a big hug.

Blue's big dark eyes glistened with tears of happiness as it gently, carefully, hugged back.

The wormhole shut down: it had been thirty-eight minutes since Blue had dialed them. Hammond had ordered Harriman to dial out as soon as that happened, and the inner wheel began turning immediately. Some of the decontamination crew had begun carefully vacuuming the more-than-seedy-things into bags to send back to the planet and release, but the rest were still on standby off to the side: they couldn't do their thing until Blue had gone home.

Of course Daniel wanted to go along. Of course Blue wanted them to come, and of course Teal'c felt it would be gracious to indulge it after the concern its people had shown. Of course Fraiser wanted them to find out what the gate saw in the seedy stuff. And of course Carter backed them all up: "Shouldn't we finish our mission, sir?"

Blue was still bouncing on its haunches, but gently now, its arms wide open. It appealed to Hammond with a double whammy of soft, hopeful trill and melting dark eyes.

Hammond chuckled, shook his head, and said, "You have a go, SG-1."

They'd come in hot, but they went out warm -- warm and fuzzy -- and Jack wasn't embarrassed about that at all.

In fact, he was kinda proud.


End file.
